Esky: Nobody Knows You.

No one, not even your most trusted associates, knows the full horror of your accumulated indiscretions or the adolescent rituals you perform even now.

Jan 29, 2007

This part of your life, this hidden life, will have to remain secret for the time being and, hopefully, immemorial.

Some folks live more secret lives than you, of course: former Nazi commandants, serial killers, politicians, and the like. the secret life of a fiend has become a second-day staple of the American newspaper, yet increasingly it is not only the alleged perp who has skeletons in his refrigerator. When a hitchhiker slit the throat of a seventy-two-year-old Florida man a couple of months ago, the story we expected to hear was of a drifter who had left a wake of elderly dead across the South and the West because, according to his lawyers, his grandfather once stuck a finger someplace. But even police seemed shocked to report that the skinny, bearded hitchhiker had gotten into the victim's house not by asking for a drink of water but because the old man and his even older wife had picked him up on I-75 for sex. "If they had that kind of secret life, I never knew about it," said one neighbor, rather unoriginally.

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It has often been said, by us among others, that there are no secret lives in post-manners America. And yet despite the media's best and least ethical efforts, something always remains hidden. One would have presumed that after nearly a decade and countless depositions, we would know the secret life of Bill Clinton. Yet we've seen little more than the scum floating on top. Quoting from the Starr report: "The president explained [to Monica] that during his life he had been two people, and kept up two fronts. The president said that starting in the third or fourth grade, he was a good boy with his mother and stepfather but also began telling stories and leading a secret life." This simple statement, overlooked by reporters scanning for the words semen and thong, plangently resounds with a Willy we hardly knew, of a secret life Dostoyevskian or at the very least Swaggarty. This is the Bill Clinton who may never be completely revealed, unless the publishing advance is sufficiently large.

Speaking of which, you'd think there is very little that Monica Lewinsky keeps to herself. But there is a Monica other than the public-record fellatrix and souvenir hound, and she's now available for only $17.46--30 percent off the list price. "This book exists," explained Andrew Morton, author of Monica's Story, "because the Monica I came to know has no relation to the image projected by the Starr report and the mass media."

A common complaint from those whose lives we celebrate, excoriate, or some combination: The image isn't the real me. We've all seen Madonna's vagina and read her thoughts about it, but lately she's been telling crowded news conferences, "I have revealed very little about myself. . . . I'd rather think that I'm slowly revealing myself--my true nature." Even Meg Ryan, whose public persona is certainly everything we would want to be known as, has taken to grousing that "Cute is not what I'm all about." Concurred her frequent cute-coupler Tom Hanks, "She's very pleasant and funny to work with, but I've always had the impression that there's this whole other woman that no one really knows."

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We are all, it goes without saying, these whole other people that no one really knows (see "The Secret Life of a Beautiful Woman," page 90). Though why we keep them secret is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps it's because he is too awful to expose even to our loved ones, perhaps because she is so brilliant it is unwise to let her be revealed just yet. Or perhaps we hold on to our secret lives because to be who people think we are is unbearably ordinary, and in the end we want to be remembered, if only by ourselves, as Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.